Jatiya Oikya Front chief Dr Kamal Hossain
speaks to the press after the inauguration of the alliance’s office in
Dhaka’s Purana Paltan on December 5

The Daily Star newspaper in Dhaka has published a report on the
contents of the draft election manifesto of the coalition of opposition
parties which is challenging the Awami League (AL) one-party government
in the December 30 election in Bangladesh. I am going to depart from my
usual caution about press reports and assume the paper got it right so
that I can write about it. The paper says that it has got hold of a
draft, and I am going to trust not only its description of the draft’s
content but that the draft will not change greatly in substance when
being put into final. That is a great leap of faith, and I hope it isn’t
a leap too far, into the void.

To remind readers about the exciting rise of this coalition,
officially named the Oikyafront, in Bangladesh, it appeared suddenly
with almost no warning in September, a coalition (or alliance) of small
centrist Bangladeshi parties, led by possibly the most prestigious
Bangladeshi political leader, Kamal Hossain. A leader of impeccable
credentials, a ‘freedom fighter’ during the struggle for independence, a
close associate of the nation’s founding father, Sheikh Mujib, law
minister in its first government and chief drafter of the country’s
original constitution, foreign minister and energy minister after that,
he is probably the only person with the gravitas to have pulled the
coalition together and to have great resonance with the public. Hossain
was joined by other venerable political leaders with great public
resonance from the other parties in the original coalition.

These small parties, with very limited vote banks, had no chance to
upset the entrenched AL government by themselves and were not taken
seriously at first. But after some delay and some negotiations, the
other major party, the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) concluded that,
after a ruthless campaign of terror, intimidation, and harassment
against it since 2014, the AL had come close to succeeding in its goal
of eliminating the BNP as a viable major party. Its senior leaders were
in jail, in exile, or inactive, its partisans, activists and foot
soldiers disillusioned and in disarray, and the party stood no chance on
its own to win against the AL either. So, reason prevailed, and the BNP
came together with the coalition to combine forces in the challenge to
the AL government. The original coalition of centrist parties brought
the leadership, both intellectual and more importantly moral legitimacy,
to the Front. The BNP brought the vote bank and the foot soldiers
needed to succeed against the formidable AL machine, grounded in methods
of harassment and intimidation, and armed with an almost blank check to
cheat in all possible ways.

This is reminiscent of how, in 1990, the two major parties, the AL
and the BNP, came together after a decade of mistrust and jealousy, in a
movement against the Ershad regime which was also used to employing
force to beat back such challenges. The temporary unity of the two
parties proved too powerful to overcome, and the army proved unwilling
to kill its own countrymen to save one of its own. Ershad was forced
from power and the two parties alternated at governing, neither doing it
very well or with much interest, as they went after each other, and
gorged on the economic rents of governance. The string of alternating
governments ran out in 2006 when the election violence became so bad
that the army took over for two years. The military interregnum missed
the opportunity to set things right by focusing on good governance and
neglecting to elaborate rules of the road for political parties and
strengthen the institutions that enforce them.

The draft manifesto addresses this lack and is a serious attempt to
begin the transformation of Bangladesh into a country on the path to
real democracy and to prevent its continuing along the authoritarian
path which the AL government has been following since the one-party
election of 2014. It recognizes implicitly that either major party could
have, and probably would have, chosen that path had it had the
opportunity. The Awami League got the opportunity first, primarily
because of its large majority in the 2008 election which gave it the
space to rescind the caretaker amendment of the constitution that
guaranteed mostly free and fair elections. It had that veto-proof
majority because the BNP’s misuse of the amendment in 2006 had led to
the military intervention and to general public opprobrium for the
party. The BNP compounded the error by boycotting the 2014 election,
which gave the AL carte blanche to try to eliminate its main rival.

There is much to the draft manifesto, but its transformative
character comes primarily through changes to the constitution that would
strengthen the checks and balances of a system in which all power now
is in the Prime Minister’s office. A second important objective appears
to be to enhance the rule of law. Among the major constitutional changes
to bring checks and balance to the system would be the creation of an
upper house of the legislature (the Jatiya Sangsad) which would be
appointed according to the percentage of votes each party receives in
general elections, and would be drawn from persons of different
professions. One presumes that this upper house would serve as some kind
of formal check on the lower house of the legislature (as does the
Senate in the US) rather than an advisory role (as the House of Lords in
the UK), but this is not specified. In addition, the draft specifies
that the Deputy Speaker of the lower house and several heads of
legislative standing committees would be reserved for opposition
members. This would be not only a check on the legislative power of the
governing party but make for better, more publicly acceptable laws. The
draft reads that the “main function of parliament will be making laws,
policies, and reviewing enforcement of these laws.” The restrictions of
the constitution against voting against a MP’s own party will be
rescinded, except for votes of confidence and the budget, and a two-term
limit would be imposed on Prime Ministers.

To strengthen institutions that enforce the rules or the road for
political parties, the draft manifesto would, in principle set the
judiciary free and independent. An independent commission, including
representatives from opposition parties, would appoint Supreme Court
judges and “officials in constitutional posts” and public opinion for
the nominees would be solicited. The Supreme Court would control the
lower judiciary. The courts will decentralize in order to reduce case
back log, and a commission will be created to decentralize the delivery
of services through strengthened city governance.

There is much more to the draft manifesto that I suspect would be
welcome by the general public that is not fundamentally transformative
but would certainly change peoples’ lives. The Front promises to refrain
from vengeance, stop extra-judicial killings and enforced
disappearances, physical torture. It would scrap the digital security
law, an act calling for surveillance that was heavily criticized by
human rights groups and others who saw the approach of a police state in
its implementation, and calls for no controls on social media.

I could go on, there is more, but readers will get the drift. If
implemented, this manifesto promises, over time and with much effort, a
completely different state on the path to real democracy. That is why I
wonder if all parts of the Front are in full agreement with it. It would
step on some very sensitive toes. But it would show a very different
side of South Asia to the world. Will the history of 1990 repeat itself?
It was Mark Twain who allegedly said that history doesn’t repeat
itself, but it often rhymes. By that, I think he meant the traumas of
the past are often echoed in the present and the recoveries from those
traumas look much like the past recoveries. So if the Oikyafront can
manage to make 2018 rhyme with 1990, it will have provided an example of
what dedicated democrats can do not only in Bangladesh and South Asia,
but for all of us who continue to deal with governments headed toward
authoritarianism or are already there.

The author is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, and a former US diplomat who was ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh

The article was originally published in The Friday Times on 14th December 2018